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Cool

By lex, on October 14th, 2008

New MacBook’s are up! Nice feature set, although not everyone is 100% in love with the glossy screens. Look for discounts on the white and black plastic machines.

(Don’t tell the Kat.)

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October 14th, 2008 | Tags: , | Category: Tech Lust

5 comments to Cool

  • Kevin
    October 14, 2008 at 2:31 pm

    If you want one of the old black plastic ones, you’d better act fast. Those have been discontinued – the white ones are still being made and are $999.

  • Teresa
    October 14, 2008 at 3:42 pm

    Oh good!! They finally have the new ones out. My husband is going to get a one of the discontinued models (since he only uses it for browsing and email at home) and I need to get one for our daughter since her current computer is about 7 years old.

    Heck I may even get one for my self for working on photos. My poor old computer is fine for most everything, but photo processing kills it.

  • steveH
    October 14, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    I’m *really* tempted to get a new MacBook Pro, and mine is only a little more than a year old now. Probably not in the budget for this year.

    My wife would like my current MBP, replacing her old Titanium PowerBook.

    I like the glossy screen a lot, by the way.

  • Humble1390
    October 14, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    WANT!

    I just need to go on det again and get a visit from the per diem fairy, first.

    Also, I’ll be curious to see the longevity of the “clickable trackpad”. Last time they tried, it worked well, but died prematurely. Luckily, those machines had a mechanical backup button.

  • Drew C.
    October 15, 2008 at 8:05 am

    Warning: What follows rapidly descends into high geek. Apologies.

    Insofar as the glossy screens go, I purchased a Toshiba Satellite about two years ago as a desktop replacement. The decision came down to that or a 17″ MacBook Pro.

    I primarily run Ubuntu Linux as an OS, with Windows XP as a backup for certain VERY IMPORTANT THINGS such as Microsoft Flight Simulator and GTR2. (Drew must have his planes and his racing cars or he gets a little irritable.)

    The tipping point for me between these two things? Primarily cost. The Toshiba was $1,600 (USD) versus a similarly configured MacBook for $2,700.

    There are CODEC issues with Mac’s that raised my eyebrows as well. (Ever tried to play a large Matroska video file using VLC and expect the soft-coded subtitles to render right? Forget it. Linux has the same issues.) A friend of mine has what was (about a year ago) a top of the line G5 that shouldn’t want for processing power or memory. Yet it JUST CAN’T RENDER SUBTITLES PROPERLY WHICH LEADS TO RAAAAAAAAAAAAGE WHEN TRYING TO WATCH AKIRA KUROSAWA MOVIES WITHOUT A DVD PLAYER.

    Apparently, MacOS has a hard time dealing with .mp4/.wmv/.wma/.ogg unless you’re prepared to go a payware route. Windows supports these formats via freeware, Linux needs a little tinkering and it will handle them fine. But, in all fairness, it’ll deal with Apple’s (frankly asinine) proprietary .aac format for the iPod nicely.

    Don’t get me wrong, I like Macs, I love the operating system (the rise of which was most eloquently described in Neal Stephenson’s ‘In the Beginning…There Was the Command Line’) and they are fantastically stable. The thought of punting the MacOS off the drive (in favor of Linux) came to mind. And now we’re back to paying $2,700 for something that I can do for $1,100 less.

    So, IMHO.

    Good Things: great physical design, OS is nine shades of pretty, simple and intuitive interface.

    Bad Things: Price, issues with playback of video/audio files in formats other than those sanctioned by Apple, application portability.

    Weird Things: the odd cardboard package with excessive postage, an incorrect address, wires poking out of it, that has oily stains and is making a ticking noise with a return address of APPLE CULT OF PERSONALITY — INTERNET CRITICISM DIVISION.

    For those of you on the fence about the matte versus glossy screen – go with the glossy screen. You’ll love it. They look fantastic and (to me) have better color than the matte screens. The big detractor is when you have someone who likes to make their point about what they’re seeing by poking the screen with their fingers.

    Speaking of which – I can always tell what pilots and AW’s have been up to in the plane by looking at the instruments and finding the fingerprints, smears, and smudges. You’re not going to change what that thing says by poking at it with Mr. Pointy and someone has to clean that business off every night.
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